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At a Loss in Red America
I believe that was the title on Mrs. Bobby's dead-tree version of the WaPo this morning. Maybe it should be, "Thrown for a Loss".GOP's Red America forced to rethink what it knows about the country Here in the heart of Red America, Cox and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama's reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign. If, as Obama likes to say, the country has decided to "move forward," it has also decided to move further away from the values and beliefs of a state where Romney won 60 percent of the vote, a county where he won 70 percent, and a town where he won nearly 80. Flyover country matters even less now. Obama got another 'mandate' and the media supports the theory. Everything in her version of America had confirmed her predictions: the confident anchors on Fox News; the Republican pollsters so sure of their data; the two-hour line outside her voting precinct, where Romney supporters hugged and honked for her handmade signs during a celebration that lasted until the results started coming in after sundown. Romney's thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed. "Virginia went blue? Really?" she said. "Southern-values Virginia?" Overwhelmed by the takers in Northern Virginia. "And Colorado? Who the heck is living in Colorado?
She blamed some of the divisiveness on Republicans. The party had gotten "way too white," she said, and she hoped it would never again run a presidential ticket without including a woman or a minority. The tea party was an extremist movement that needed to be "neutralized," she said, Did she say that or did the Post writer editorialize? and Romney's campaign had suffered irreparable damage when high-profile Republicans spoke about "crazy immigration talk and legitimate rape." But many other aspects of the division seemed fundamental and harder to solve. There was the America of increased secularism that legalized marijuana. And there was her America, where her two teenage daughters are not allowed to read "Harry Potter" or "Twilight," and where one of them wrote in a school paper: "God is the center and the main foundation of my family." There was the America of There was the America of She could sense liberalism creeping closer, and she worried about what Red America would look like after four more years. Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch. Some of her friends had begun to wonder if the country was lost, and if only God could save it. Cox came outside to watch the mover climb on top of his trailer to take down the "Sumner County Republican Party" banner that had hung on the front of the building. It had belonged to a doctor's practice that had closed, and then to a newspaper that had downsized, and finally to a campaign that had failed to win office based on its vision of America. More like overwhelmed by the 98% turnout in Philadelphia. But the U.S. House still belongs to the people of flyover country, and the Dims forget there are still at least 49% of the people did not vote for them.
Posted by: Bobby 2012-11-12 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=355893 |